Costa Fortuna

Costa Fortuna is on her way out. Costa announced her sale to Margaritaville at Sea in May 2025; she stays in Costa service until September 2026 and then goes to the Bahamas-based operator to become Margaritaville at Sea Beachcomber. That is why this page has five sailings on it rather than three hundred, and it is the first thing to know before booking her.

She was, when Fincantieri delivered her at Sestri Ponente on October 31, 2003, the largest cruise ship ever built in Italy, the first past 100,000 gross tons from an Italian yard. The hull is the Carnival Destiny platform, adapted for Costa, and at 272 metres and 102,587 gross tons she is a shorter, beamier shape than the Concordia ships that followed her.

The liner ship

Her interiors are the reason people remember her. She is themed, throughout, on the Italian passenger liners of the twentieth century, the ships the Costa family and its competitors ran across the Atlantic and down to South America before jets took the business away. Public rooms carry the names of the old vessels, the decor is Art Deco rather than contemporary, and the centrepiece is the atrium: models of twenty-six past and present Costa ships suspended upside-down from the ceiling above the lobby, so that you look up into a harbour seen from below the waterline.

It is the most genuinely distinctive interior in the fleet, and it is about to be painted over. Whatever Margaritaville does with her, it will not be this.

Beyond that she is a conventional early-2000s ship: four restaurants, eleven bars and lounges, 1,358 cabins of which 522 have balconies, thirteen passenger decks, and 1,027 crew. There is no water park, no specialty-dining district and no promenade to speak of.

Why the Destiny platform matters

The hull she sits on is worth a note, because it explains her proportions. The Carnival Destiny design of the mid-1990s was the first cruise ship too wide for the old Panama Canal locks, and it was built around a tall central atrium with the public rooms stacked on two promenade decks either side of it. That arrangement puts a great deal of the ship’s activity into a relatively small footprint, good for atmosphere, less good on a full sailing, and the reason a Destiny-class ship feels busier than her tonnage suggests. Costa took two of them: Costa Fortuna in 2003 and her sister Costa Magica in 2004, the latter no longer in the fleet.

She is also short for her size. At 272 metres she is eighteen metres shorter than the Concordia ships that came after her while carrying nearly the same beam, which makes her a stubbier, higher-sided vessel and gives her a noticeably different motion in a swell.

Where she actually sails

Five departures are loaded for her, all of them in the last month of her Costa career, and all in the Aegean.

Two seven-night weeks turn around at Istanbul, two at Piraeus for Athens, and one five-night one-way runs Istanbul to Piraeus. The port list is short and it is the classic Eastern Mediterranean circuit: Istanbul, Piraeus, Mykonos, Rhodes, Heraklion on Crete, and Santorini. The first leaves on August 16, 2026; the last on September 6, 2026.

That is the entire deployment this site carries for her, and it is not a sample of a larger program; it is what is left. There is no winter season, no repositioning voyage and no 2027 calendar, because by then she will be sailing for somebody else under another name. The fares reflect it: hers are the highest opening prices of any Costa ship in the current window, which is what happens when demand meets a five-sailing inventory that will not be restocked.

Who she suits

Anyone who wants a straightforward Greek islands week at the end of the season and does not mind a twenty-three-year-old ship. The itinerary is the good one (Santorini, Mykonos, Rhodes and Crete in seven nights, with Istanbul at one end), and the fares on a ship in her final weeks with an operator tend to be the cheapest thing in the Aegean.

She suits ship enthusiasts more particularly. The liner-themed interiors and the upside-down fleet in the atrium are worth seeing, and this is the last chance to see them.

She does not suit anyone who wants a modern cruise. The cabins are small by current standards, the balcony count is low, the entertainment is dated and the public rooms have had twenty years of hard European service. Anyone comparing her against Costa Smeralda on price alone should look at the two deck plans first.

She is also a poor choice for anyone who wants flexibility. Five sailings across three weeks is the whole calendar; if the dates do not work, they will not start working, and the next Aegean week on this line is on a different ship.